Book review: On Canaan’s Side pushes its prose to its poetic limit

Book review: Readers of
Sebastian Barryâs A Long Long Way may remember Lilly, younger sisterÂ of that bookâs tragic protagonist, Willie

Fiction Of The Week: On Canaanâs Side By Sebastian Barry

Here, she reappearsÂ as the narrator of Barryâs fifth and recently Booker-longlisted novel, now 89 and a woman who has lived most of her life in the US â and endured her share of that countryâs tumultuous 20th-century history.

Her story is forged from Irelandâs own political turmoil (Lilly andÂ her husband-to-be fled Ireland in the 1920s with an IRA death sentence hanging over their heads), while it ends with another conflict, this time in the Gulf, and, lurkingÂ in the shadows, the presence of another death.

Barryâs arrhythmic prose is knobbly, almost edible and violently unexpected. He has a knack for putting words in anarchic configurations to yield surreally beautiful images and off-kilter observations about the eviscerating sensations of loss and pain.

The US is presented as a seething, modern sanctuary of different people where one can reinvent oneself, yet with its racial politics and wars, it also strains and breaks many of the people in Lillyâs life â although never quite Lilly herself.

Barry demands too much of his narrative â background characters abruptly jerk into view and then fade; the pile-up of historical events is almost too much to take.

That Lillyâs voice â a hallucinatory incantation of grief â remains sure even as the story itself falls away is testament to Barryâs transcendent poetic skills.